Portal:Water/Highlighted Heroes

Josh Fox is the director of the groundbreaking documentary Gasland. He is the founder and artistic director of the International WOW Company. Josh earned his BA from Columbia University. He is the founder and Artistic Director of International WOW Company, a film and theater company that works closely with actors and non actors from diverse cultural backgrounds, including members of the United States military, activist communities in sustainable energy and design and actors, dancers, designers and filmmakers from around the world to create new work that addresses current national and global social and political crises. Josh's work is known for its mix of gripping narrative, heightened imagery and its commitment to socially conscious themes and subjects.

In the film, Fox unmasks truly shocking revelations--water that can be lit on fire right out of the sink, chronically ill residents of drilling areas from disparate locations in the U.S. all with the same mysterious symptoms, huge pools of toxic waste that kill cattle and vegetation well blowouts, and huge gas explosions consistently covered up by state and federal regulatory agencies.

More information on Josh can be seen here: http://gaslandthemovie.com/about-the-film/team and here:  http://internationalwow.com/newsite/josh.html.

Abrahm Lustgarten is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is currently employed as an investigative reporter for Pro Publica, a nonprofit investigative journalism news organization whose mission is described as "To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing."

Lustgarten's reporting has been instrumental in uncovering a plethora of information about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. His work on the issue has been compared to that of journalist Jeremy Scahill on the wrongdoings of Blackwater. Lustgarten, like Scahill, often seems to be fighting a one-man journalistic battle, as the chief source of uncovering the truth on this particular issue. Lustgarten was a 2009 recipient of a George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting for documenting the deadly side effects of hydrofracking.

All of Lustgarten's reporting on the Marcellus Shale can be seen here: http://www.propublica.org/site/author/Abrahm_Lustgarten. He can be followed on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/#!/AbrahmL.

Mark Ruffalo is an outspoken anti-drilling activist, as well as a formidable actor, most famous for his roles in the movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Zodiac, Shutter Island, The Kids Are All Right, Just Like Heaven, Rumor Has It and You Can Count On Me. In the political world, and in particular, in the world of natural gas drilling, he is most well known for his tenacity in fighting against drilling in the Marcellus Shale. In exchange for his outspokenness, Ruffalo was placed on a terrorist watch list by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security after having shown a screening of the movie Gasland in a public forum in Pennsylvania. This was reported by both the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/dailydish/detail?entry_id=77671) and Time Magazine (http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/11/30/does-pennsylvania-consider-actor-mark-ruffalo-a-terrorist/). An October appearance by Ruffalo on the Rachel Maddow Show can be seen here: http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/10/05-0. All of his articles, published by the Huffington Post, can be seen here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-ruffalo. He tweets often about the injustices of fracking--his account can be seen here: http://twitter.com/#!/mruff221.